does not matter
which--who protected Curll whilst he stood on high from further outrage,
and when his penance was over bore him on their shoulders to an adjacent
tavern, where (it is alleged) he got right royally drunk. {65} Ten years
earlier those pleasant youths, the Westminster scholars, had got hold of
him, tossed him in a blanket, and beat him. This was the man who bought
Pope's letters to Cromwell for ten guineas, and published them. Pope,
oddly enough, though very angry, does not seem on this occasion to have
moved the Court of Chancery, as he subsequently did against the same
publisher, for an injunction to restrain the vending of the volume.
Indeed, until his suit in 1741, when he obtained an injunction against
Curll, restraining the sale of a volume containing some of his letters to
Swift, the right of the writer of a letter to forbid its publication had
never been established, and the view that a letter was a gift to the
receiver had received some countenance. But Pope had so much of the true
temper of a litigant, and so loved a nice point, that he might have been
expected to raise the question on the first opportunity. He, however,
did not do so, and the volume had a considerable sale--a fact not likely
to be lost sight of by so keen an author as Pope, to whom the thought
occurred, 'Could I only recover all my letters, and get them published, I
should be as famous in prose as I am in rhyme.' His communications with
his friends now begin to be full of the miscreant Curll, against whose
machinations and guineas no letters were proof. Have them Curll would,
and publish them he would, to the sore injury of the writer's feelings.
The only way to avoid this outrage upon the privacy of true friendship
was for all the letters to be returned to the writer, who had arranged
for them to be received by a great nobleman, against whose strong boxes
Curll might rage and surge in vain. Pope's friends did not at first
quite catch his drift. 'You need give yourself no trouble,' wrote Swift,
though at a later date than the transaction I am now describing; 'every
one of your letters shall be burnt.' But that was not what Pope wanted.
The first letters he recovered were chiefly those he had written to Mr.
Caryll, a Roman Catholic gentleman of character. Mr. Caryll parted with
his letters with some reluctance, and even suspicion, and was at the
extraordinary pains of causing them all to be transcribed; in a word, he
kep